1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a harvesting attachment (adapter), which--mounted to the front part of a known combine--serves for gathering grain crops, especially of such kinds, which readily drop out their seeds, such as sunflower.
2. Description of the Prior Art
As known, sunflower is one of our most important oil-yielding plants. In the case of ripe sunflower crops it can be observed, that in the course of harvesting sunflower grains tend to drop easily out of the sunflower disks. This dropping-out of grains, however, causes considerable harvesting losses. This loss is often further increased by the deficient capability of gathering lodged and entangled stems, as experienced with the known harvesting machines, whereby much of the crop remains ungathered in the field, and the harvesting loss becomes excessive.
From the Hungarian patent specification No. 178.941 a sunflower harvesting adapter is known, which is mounted to the front part of a conventional combine and which can be raised and lowered by means of hydraulic working cylinders of the combine. This sunflower harvesting adapter has an underframe provided at its front part with projecting finger-like nose cones by pairs straddling and directing the aligned sunflower stems. These nose cones guide said stems into channels arranged parallel with the direction of travel, where the stems are cut by a reaping mechanism so that they get into a catch trough. From here the cut-off crop is passed by charge pulleys into the central region of said trough, from where said cut-off crop is transferred by a slanting conveyor of the combine into the thrashing mechanism of said corn combine.
In the described arrangement the sunflower grains knocked out of the sunflower disks by the arising impacts are retained by tray-like coverings located on either side of said parallel channels. In normal working position of the harvesting adapter, these fixed tray-like coverings are inclined 25 to 35% backwards in the direction of the gathering worms and catch trough.
Practical experience has shown, however, that when gathering short-stem and/or lodged sunflower this harvesting adapter has to be operated as close as possible to the soil level, but to do so, the adapter must be tilted forward. But, by this forward tilting the backward slanting angle of the tray-like coverings considerably decreases or may even cease to exist, consequently the sunflower grains dropping out will not be able to slip back under the effect of gravitation into the direction of the catch tray of the gathering worms. Thus, the efficiency of harvesting will fail to attain the desirable level.